Movie Reviews Only

The trouble with rock 'n' roll in A Star Is Born is that there isn't any. The soundtrack is filled with homogenized harmonics passing for rock, but not a single song is good enough even to be counterfeit. - TIME MagazineEDIT

It is like a lunatic opera, an attempt to make a furious poem out of frenzy. Russell's flamboyant theatricality and his interest in the perverse have been too much imposed on his other films; but here, style and subject are perfectly matched. - TIME MagazineEDIT

Peter Boyle, as the salesman, and James Caan, as the swine, do the best they can, which is extremely well indeed, but the movie's clumsy feints at sophistication and its grotesque sentimentality prevail. - TIME MagazineEDIT

The idea is that everything will be more interesting if Sean Connery or Ingrid Bergman, rather than the characters they play, is suspected of having committed the foul deed. The device does not work, despite the [actors'] occasionally droll efforts. - TIME MagazineEDIT

[Loden] captures the ambiance of small-time roadhouses with compelling accuracy; she manages through some clever location photography to convey an almost overwhelming sense of lingering desperation. - TIME MagazineEDIT

Sinbad is light, silly fun, and kids will probably appreciate both the skillful technique of the fantasy and the fact that the film makers have had the good sense not to include a single -- yecchh! -- kissing scene. - TIME MagazineEDIT

What is left, besides a lot of pretty dolphin footage, is some bad intercollegiate-revue satire, a shadow of Sea Hunt, and a calculated sentimentality that evokes memories of Lassie Come Home. - TIME MagazineEDIT

Since Young Winston attempts to be a kind of vest-pocket spectacle, there are also a couple of the battles in which he fought (a set-to in the Sudan, a Boer skirmish). Attenborough stages them with all the fury of a grade school recess. - TIME MagazineEDIT

This superb and singular film catches not only the charm and tribal energy of the teen-age 1950s but also the listlessness and the resignation that underscored it all like an incessant bass line in one of the rock-'n'-roll songs of the period. - TIME MagazineEDIT

A tragedy of such magnitude becomes an event abstracted by arithmetic. But Ray's artistry alters the scale. His concentrating on just a few victims of the famine causes such massive loss to become real, immediate. - TIME MagazineEDIT

Wonderful potential, and wasted. Serpico has some brutal surface flash and an acetylene performance by Al Pacino in the title role, but its energy is used to dodge all the questions it should have raised and answered. - TIME MagazineEDIT

The Duke knows by instinct what audiences accept without question: whatever he may be called in the script, he is always unmistakably John Wayne. And who would have it any other way? - TIME MagazineEDIT

Watching this movie has approximately the same effect as being locked overnight in a secondhand clothing store in Pasadena. There is an awful lot of dust and, after a while, the dummies look as if they are moving. - TIME MagazineEDIT

The movie is adept at portraying aimlessness, getting at the greasy anomie that was so much a part of that time. But there is a lack of ambition, as if no one involved in creating the film wanted to cut deeper than a little double-edged nostalgia. - TIME MagazineEDIT

Eastwood displays a vigorous talent for sequences of violence and tension. He has obviously seen Psycho and Repulsion more than once, but those are excellent texts and he has learned his lessons passing well. - TIME MagazineEDIT